With Tiger out, others roaring

There is big money to be made by other golfers who have been left out of the purses.

BETHESDA, Md. (AP) — The AT&T National is missing eight of the top 10 players in the world, only one of them on crutches.

“As everyone knows, I’m not going to be there to play in the event,” Tiger Woods said.

He won’t be at Royal Birkdale or Oakland Hills for the final two majors. He won’t get to wear a tuxedo for the gala dinner at the Ryder Cup. And he won’t be at East Lake for the Tour Championship to see who will be the first to kiss the FedEx Cup.

The PGA Tour sees this as a wonderful opportunity to showcase so many other stars in golf. But why should that be anything new? There have been 28 tournaments this year, and Wood played only six of them before season-ending surgery on his left knee.

The real opportunity belongs to the players.

Who stands to gain the most from the world’s No. 1 player spending the next six months on his couch?

“Everyone,” Robert Allenby said Tuesday on a quiet practice range at Congressional, where Woods was nowhere to be found except on the promotional posters. “There’s anywhere between $300,000 to $1 million every week that’s up for grabs.”

He was close.

In the 11 tour events that Woods played after he heard his ACL pop while jogging after the British Open last year, he picked up seven checks worth at least $1 million, and the smallest was $285,000 for a fifth-place finish at Doral.

The British Open is in two weeks. It will be the first major without Woods since Mark Brooks won the 1996 PGA Championship, a week before Woods captured his third straight U.S. Amateur.

Woods was a 5-to-2 favorite at Royal Birkdale after winning the U.S. Open. Three days later, when he announced he was done for the year, Sergio Garcia and Ernie Els were installed as co-favorites at 12-to-1.

“You look at guys who haven’t won majors,” Hunter Mahan said. “You think of Adam Scott and Sergio. But if they do win, there will be an asterisk because Tiger wasn’t there. They’re going to be the Houston Rockets of the mid-90s when they won back-to-back titles after Michael Jordan retired.”

Winning a claret jug without Woods around would not bother Allenby.

“If I win, I’m going to have it on my mantle, drinking the best wine in the world out of it,” he said. “Everyone else can go get stuffed.”

Who has the most to gain?

The answer starts with Phil Mickelson, and not just because he is No. 2 in the world.

Lefty probably won’t be able to replace Woods atop the world ranking unless he wins a major, a World Golf Championship and one or two other events worldwide, which is more than he’s ever done in one season.

But there is much more on the table.

Only a dozen players have won more PGA Tour events than Mickelson, who has 34 career victories and three majors. Just his luck he came around in the era of Woods, which is why someone of that caliber has never won a PGA Tour money title, player of the year or the Vardon Trophy for the lowest scoring average.

One of his best years was in 1996 when he won four times, and Mickelson looked like a shoo-in to win the money title. But in the final event of the year, Tom Lehman won the Tour Championship to earn $540,000, edging out Mickelson by $82,630.

Then Woods came along, and that was that.